


these bodies like prayers

by feralphoenix



Series: how it felt to taste the moon [1]
Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Birth Control, Gen, Needles, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 03:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2009577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Madoka goes to the doctor to get her shots, feat. awkward boners and even more awkward social situations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these bodies like prayers

**Author's Note:**

> _(some to weave into my hair_ – raindrops like candy)
> 
> title loosely derived from [this caitlyn siehl poem](http://alonesomes.tumblr.com/post/87139808996/we-are-like-a-religion-we-the-tired-ones-we)

There’s not a line in the hospital corridors, even though there are chairs in neat rows to either side of the door just like the times Madoka’s had to come to get her shots. “That’s normal,” her mother told her; “everybody’s hormonal cycles are different, so there’s young kids about your age coming down here at all times of the year.”

“Why not just give everyone the shot before, Mama?” Madoka had asked. This was on the car ride up, private enough that they could still talk freely about such things without the risk of giving away Madoka’s status.

“Inoculation’s tricky exactly because everybody hits puberty at different times,” said Junko, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “It’d be nice if there was some kind of perfect way to make sure everybody can get the shot and the implant beforehand. But we know from when the government was just starting to put these laws in place—that was a long time before you were born, way back before I was even your age—that the way these things work does weird things to a kid’s body if they get the treatment too early.”

Madoka shivered and looked out the window. “That’s kinda scary.”

“Maybe back then, but we know how to use them safely now.” Junko reached out and patted her down the part in her hair. “And even though it’s still not an excuse to pretend like you don’t need a condom—STDs are a thing, baby girl—it’s still better than making babies while you’re stuck in compulsory education.”

Unspoken went the whole rhetoric of _kids get carried away and make mistakes, especially alphas and omegas._ But Madoka already knew that. Knows that. She’s taken the human biology and health and sexuality classes just like all the other first years. The girls’ changing room is filled with giggling and gossip, and Madoka’s pretty sure that half the gossip is exaggerated or just plain made up, but there are enough brainless-horny-alpha jokes flying around that changing into her bloomers for gym makes her paranoid of the others’ stares.

(She’s tried to go to school wearing two pairs of tucking underwear on top of each other before; her mother sat her down and told her—Madoka was grateful that Junko was so careful not to laugh—that that’s not how tucking works, put ‘em back.)

Junko’s still back in the waiting room filing paperwork, so it’s with the usual anxiety that Madoka peers into the mostly empty hallway to find only one other girl there. She won’t have to wait and worry alone; she will have to be careful how she sits and acts. Skirts, like the one she’s wearing, are easier to hide an alpha bulge under, but. She _knows_ how kids her age treat alpha girls. Hitomi shuts down the teasing by being austere and perfect and intimidating, but Madoka turns red and then blubbers. (So much for alphas’ so-called _unbecoming aggressiveness_.)

But, so. Madoka sits down and tries a smile at the other girl. She looks like she’s about Madoka’s age, twelve or thirteen; she’s taller than Madoka with long dark hair tied up in braids, coke bottle glasses, no breasts to speak of. Her clothes are loose heavy fabric, nicer than Madoka usually wears, and betray no hint at whether she’s an alpha or a beta or omega. She might be cute if she weren’t so pale, or at least wasn’t wearing an expression that would look at home on Eeyore from Madoka’s old Pooh storybooks from overseas. Maybe she’s rich: She smells very nice, like a florist’s shop mixed with something fruity and something earthy, so she must be wearing a fancy perfume.

“Hi,” says Madoka.

“Um,” says the girl. “Hello.”

“Are you here for your shots too?” says Madoka, and mentally kicks herself because—of course the girl is, why else would she be sitting here, she must be thinking Madoka’s an idiot—but it’s too late, so she keeps talking, the pitch of her voice climbing and the words running into each other like streamwater. “It’s nice not being alone, I mean, at least in a hospital. I know it’s silly but doctor visits still make me sort of nervous? So I turned the corner and you were there and I was like, oh wow, thank goodness I’m not by myself.”

“Er,” says the girl.

Madoka giggles. She knows her face is red as anything. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m babbling, I know, I’m sorry. I don’t like needles.”

The girl grins just a little, looking a bit guilty and secretive. Her dark eyes twinkle behind those thick lenses. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m still not used to getting injections either.”

Madoka grins back, self-deprecating. When the girl sits up her long hair sways, and her perfume washes over Madoka, making her feel as giddy as if she’s six again and defying early bedtimes with adrenaline and too much chocolate.

Except that there’s one part of her that’s decidedly _not_ six, and resisting the urge to squirm around in her seat to be more comfortable is sending a spike of pain straight from her crotch to her belly button. Her ears feel hot. She absolutely cannot adjust things unless she wants to give her alpha status away, and make the girl across from her really uncomfortable too.

Madoka kind of wishes that there was a shot to get rid of the horny-all-the-time part of being an alpha too, not just the chance of babies. She has had to worry about things like boobs and periods and rutting for less than a year and she already wants to go back to before puberty. Back to the days when older kids’ jokes about sex didn’t make any sense and she didn’t need them to, before tucking started to hurt, when her and every other kid’s curfew was sundown. It feels like she’s gotten big chunks of adulthood all dropped into her lap at once, and she’s so not ready for them.

“I’m not,” says the girl, who drops her gaze to the tile and wets her lips with the tip of her tongue (Madoka’s alpha parts are burning; so is her face), “here for shots though. I have—another thing, an appointment. I’m an inpatient,” she admits at last.

“Oh.” Madoka scrubs her hands over her face in shame. She wishes for a bucket of cold water that she could maybe dunk her head in, or pour over her body. She feels like every cell in her body is inappropriate. “I’m really sorry. For assuming and, um. Running my mouth.”

“It’s okay.”

How could it be okay, I want to vanish off the face of the earth, is what Madoka wants to say. Instead she asks, “Have you already had yours? Or not yet?”

“I can’t,” says the girl.

“Huh?” says Madoka.

“I can’t,” says the girl, and when Madoka peeks through her fingers, she’s blushing and playing with the ends of her hair. Every time she slips her fingertips through her braids, more of that terrible, wonderful perfume wafts over Madoka, until Madoka is only keeping from whimpering by the skin of her teeth. “There are too many side effects with… umm, my other medicine. So I can’t get shots until I’m done with my treatment.”

Madoka swallows. “That sounds kind of scary.”

The girl laughs. The sound is a little like a deflating balloon. “It’s not—I spend all my time here anyway, I mean. I’m not.” She drops her hair, lifts little hands half-hidden in her sleeves, and makes air quotes. “I’m not ‘healthy enough for sexual activity’.”

“Yikes,” says Madoka, for lack of anything else.

“Mm. I’m eligible for outpatient maybe next year, we’re hoping I’ll be able to cut down some of my medications enough to get it. I mean I’ve got the legal permissions and all for an exception but—it’s. I mean it’s the law for a reason.”

“Yeah,” says Madoka. She pulls at her pigtails absently, looking at everything but the girl, really hoping that things under her skirt calm down fast. “Um. That’s too bad. I mean being that sick and, uh, I was hoping maybe if you’d already had your shots you could warn me if they hurt.”

The girl giggles. Madoka shrugs. At least things tend to be less awkward when she’s invited other people to laugh at her.

“Maybe if I get called in first, I’ll get to warn you instead,” Madoka ventures with a grin, but:

“Akemi,” calls a voice from the open door on the girl’s side, and she stands up so quickly that she nearly trips over her own slippered feet.

“I’ve got to go,” says the girl unnecessarily. “I’m sorry.”

Madoka waves a little. She clenches her knees together. “That’s okay,” she says. “See you later, maybe.”

“Bye,” says the girl called Akemi, and ducks into the room. The door closes behind her.

The smell of her perfume lingers for another five or ten minutes. By the time it disappears, Madoka is already getting called into the examination room to answer questions and get her forearm and upper arm both swapped and pricked. The shot’s not so bad, but putting the implant in makes her yelp, and hurts so bad it finally kills her boner.

“Don’t poke at it,” the nurse says bracingly, her tone telling Madoka she’s repeated this warning to about a million thirteen-year-olds in her career. And Madoka tries not to, even though the sensation of something under her skin that doesn’t belong there is urging her to try to pull the foreign body out.

When she leaves, told to go back to the waiting room and find her mother, the door on the other side of the hall is open. There’s no trace of Akemi but for the ghost of her perfume.


End file.
